Everything has a dominant culture that exists by these rules, thats just the nature of how human societies form. In those cultures there are always people who are more respected or less respected, as well there are always rules of conduct. There are always two types of influence, those with direct influence, like moderators, and those with indirect influence, like Namdrol (and many others whose opinions are also respected and looked up to, even if they don't realize it).
I don't think the culture here is one sided, I think that when opinions are stated as facts of Buddhism people call into question the validity of those facts by referring to the teachings. When its found that there is no corroboration in the teachings for a stated opinion, and when one cannot use superior reasoning to demonstrate why that opinion *should* be included in the teachings, then its decided that such an opinion is OK to hold if thats what you want to do, but not OK to call Buddhism, since its not.
Now of course this always upsets peoples ego. People always think that their beliefs and opinions are soooo important, but in reality they are not important in the sense that they are important because "you" hold them. They are only important insofar as they allow you to work towards or away from liberation. People always want to say "I can do what I want!", but that will lead you nowhere except further into ignorance. Its true, you can be an Eternalist nutjob and call it Buddhism, you have free will and sentience, so yes you can make that choice. But in order to keep the content on Dharma Wheel worth reading, those opinions are relegated to a specific subforum, and for the rest of the forums they are discussed to a point, but when its clearly demonstrated that it has no place in Dharma, continued discussion is basically not allowed.
As someone with no influence and who was not on esangha, I appreciate that. I like the good quality content of these forums, as opposed to it being filled with random opinions and such without any controls. I know that when certain people reply, I can seriously consider their answers in good faith knowing they are more experienced than I am. I also like knowing that I can express my opinion as long as I express it as an opinion, or as my personal experience, and that even then when people correct me they are not mean about it, they just say "no, its more like this" and I appreciate that as well because it helps me correct wrong views. I like that better than a situation where they (people posting quality content) are constantly having to defend their position against something absurd like some new age belief or whatever in the Dharma, and where ultimately those people will stop putting up with it, leave the forum, and leave it to a bunch of uninformed idiots like me
. If the Dharma is Truth, which I believe it is, then that Truth is the Truth, and any deviation from that Truth is obviously not Truth. So why bother allowing deviation from the Truth? Of course now I sound like an extremist, but I could provide my well reasoned argument for this, but it would take me a few pages so I'm not going to do that...